Nope.
Both my USAF jobs had a lot of people who either had been or would later be stationed there. So although I missed going there myself I worked closely with lots of people with first-hand experience. As you suggest.
In that era NK was still quite the hot issue within the DoD. So the politico-military situation on the Peninsula was a significant part of professional interest and professional education.
:smack:
As I’ve said before, the best case scenario for the rest of the world is also the worst case scenario for the people of North Korea, ie a nice, lethal, fast-acting and spreading plague. One with about a 95% mortality rate. Get the population down to 5 million or so and reintegration of the peninsula is a possibility.
Hell, just cleaning up the DMZ will take billions of dollars and several decades of effort. Feeding and containing 25 million ignorant, starving, brain-washed peasants until they can be retrained would collapse the economy of the planet, even if you could get everybody on board. But the problem is too large for a couple of “Korea-Aid” concerts and a few tip jars to solve, and any politician that runs on a “Beggar us to help the North Koreans” platform will find themselves turfed out in a fortnight.
We could hope for an asteroid strike, I suppose. 
Benevolent aliens come to Earth and in looking for a place to land their 25 x 100 mile spaceship, reason that the place on Earth with the least amount of nighttime light is the least inhabited and crunch goes North Korea.
The only way the US will go to war with North Korea and UN okay with it is if it did some thing really stupid like attack on US navy ship, attack in south Korea, attack on Japan or Hawaii!! Or a attack of shore close to US city.
So with North Korea that likes to send missiles and even crude nukes and attacks in Oceans trying improve the range and provoke a response from UN it will have to make sure it never hits ship, land, attack in south Korea, attack on Japan or Hawaii or of shore close to US city.
Such attack even if only 10 people die will be end of North Korea.
There is no way the US and the UN will allow North Korea missiles or even crude nukes hinting land well North Korea improves it range and technology.
This only way I would see US will go to war with North Korea. A missile or even crude nuke of shore close to LA would be end to North Korea. I don’t see the US or UN okay of supporting war any other way.
I was under the impression they had made meaningful reforms.
Politifact said it is a mostly false statement though.
This said the worst since 1989.
http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hotan-02162015160611.html/humanrights-02162015165824.html
I thought they were making constant improvement since 1978. I guess not. That is disappointing.
They had made some pretty significant gains. Albeit from a very low base. At their best we’d still consider them a police state by our standards. Then the current administration of Xi Jinping took over. It’s been mostly back to the bad old days since then.
Net net things currently aren’t materially better than 20ish years ago. Some rearrangement of the oppression deck chairs over that time but that’s about it. Although with the internet there’s a lot more opportunity for the public to know about, and mutter about, the problems of the day. Despite very aggressive efforts by the Party to control all speech on the net.
I think this would draw the “(somewhat) proportional response.” Maybe something like Operation Desert Fox, with limited airstrikes, but no way the US incurs a massive full-out assault, Operation Iraqi Freedom-type regime change operation on North Korea over an attack killing just ten Americans.
Interesting, thanks. Was just curious.
I don’t think in today’s world you can control speech. Lots of Chinese’s are using proxies and vpn’s to bypass the internet firewall in China. It is matter of time before they start to pass reform bills. It is really hard in today’s world to control every thing. With out shutting everything down and using radio jamming like in North Korea.
This is my post from several years ago and I wish I could delete it. I was extremely ignorant of this topic back then, calling for an attack on a sovereign nation and wrongly accusing all its leadership of being fascists. This is the epitome of cringe stupidity and it should be scrubbed from the internet. Man, what capitalist propaganda will do to a mf…
Moderating:
And while we don’t delete threads or posts in general, especially old ones. We do close them when they start generating flags about very old posts.
I’ll leave this one closed. A new thread on the subject could be started.